Katharine Q. Seelye of The Al-Qaeda Times looks at the effects that the Internet and the blogsphere are having on The Elite Media Monoculture. Mostly she pines away for the good old days when reporters with a liberal slant could spin the news as they see fit and there was no way for critics to reply or answer back with a different view. Note for the record here that in this story Seelye admits that journalists have regularly taken quotes out of context, printed a single quote from a more extensive interview or just plain ignored things they didn't like.
But with the rise of the Internet and citizen commentary in the form of blogs, the old media can't control how a story will be presented outside of their own newspaper pages. Interview subjects now routinely post their own complete transcripts on their own web sites, thus allowing readers to judge for themselves how the reporter may have filtered the information which they actually print in their papers or air on their television programs. And when the Times or any other outlet puts out a story, there are millions of fact-checkers in the blogsphere waiting to find any factual mistakes or to scrutinize the spin of the reporter who wrote it.
Just ask "Nightline," the ABC News program, which broadcast a segment in August about intelligent design that the Discovery Institute, a conservative clearinghouse for proponents of intelligent design, did not like very much. The next day, the institute published on its Web site the entire transcript of the nearly hourlong interview that "Nightline" had conducted a few days earlier with one of the institute's leaders, not just the brief quotes that had appeared on television.
The institute did not accuse "Nightline" of any errors. Rather, it urged readers to examine the unedited interview because, it said, the transcript would reveal "the predictable tone of some of the questions" by the staff of "Nightline."
"Here's your chance to go behind the scenes with the gatekeepers of the national media to see how they screen out viewpoints and information that don't fit their stereotypes," Rob Crowther, the institute's spokesman, wrote on the Web site.
The Elite Media Monoculture has having a hard time adapting to this new reality. They seem not to want to acknowledge that the rules of the game have changed and that from now on the audience has more than one choice of viewpoint. Some of the reporters quoted in the story sound downright cranky about the fact that they are now being closely examined for errors and bias.
Danny Schechter, executive editor of MediaChannel.org and a former producer at ABC News and CNN, said that while the active participation by so many readers was healthy for democracy and journalism, it had allowed partisanship to mask itself as media criticism and had given rise to a new level of vitriol.
"It's now O.K. to demonize the messenger," he said. "This has led to a very uncivil discourse in which it seems to be O.K. to shout down, discredit, delegitimize and denigrate the people who are reporting stories and to pick at their methodology and ascribe motives to them that are often unfair."
Thomas Kunkel, dean of the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland, said reporting on reporters had created a kind of "Wild West atmosphere" in cyberspace.
With reporters conducting interviews more frequently by e-mail, he said, "You have to start thinking a couple of moves ahead because you're leaving a paper trail. And the truth squad mentality of some bloggers means you are apt to have your own questions thrown back at you."
Fortunately there is little that The Elite Media Monoculture can do to get back their monopoly of information control and distribution. Commentary and opinion on the Internet are now a part of our culture, protected by the first amendment. Millions of people who take an active interest in politics, culture and other subjects, are now free to become their own publishers for the cost of a computer and an Internet connection. The leftist press can't get around that fact and will have to adapt to the new world of open-source information or perish from inflexibility.
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